1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate generally to reference data management having high reusability in cloud computing environments and more particularly to a method, apparatus and system for sharing the same reference data among a plurality of application programs executed by a plurality of virtual machines.
2. Description of the Related Art
When more than one virtual machine operates in physical machines in cloud computing environment, application programs in different virtual machines which perform calculations based on the same reference data can be executed. Particularly, a size of reference data required by biological information application programs is very large (e.g., from several hundreds of MBs to several tens of TBs) and such data also has high reusability according to application algorithm in analysis.
In addition, when computing nodes refer to the same reference data at the same time in cloud computing environments, the same data can be duplicated in the memory of each node and each computing node causes disk input/output (I/O) in order to load reference data, which results in inefficiency of a processor.
A method for comparing data stored in a memory to avoid duplicated data has been used in order to resolve these problems. However, it shows problem of high memory requirements when the system is not stabilized.